Falling Under the Lens of Suspicion: Identifying Behavioral Factors that Generate Suspicion

在每一起虚假定罪案件中，当一个无辜的人成为嫌疑人时，调查都会有一个关键时刻。尽管关于这一推定有罪如何引发确认偏差的连锁反应的说法数不胜数，这些连锁反应污染了刑事司法程序的所有阶段，但人们对最初是什么引发了对无辜的怀疑知之甚少。从现有和将要创建的数据库中提取，该项目的首要目标是识别和了解哪些人口统计、行为和语言因素最初会引发怀疑并触发危险的确认偏差过程，从而导致错误定罪。我们关注的是一个人可能成为嫌疑人的最早时刻之一：当他们拨打911。一个关键的假设是，当证人的行为违反预期时，人们在道德上将证人塑造成不太可能成为受害者，而更有能力成为犯罪者的人。对这些期望是如何形成的，它们是如何被违反的，以及它们如何与证人的性别和种族相互作用，加深对这些期望的基本了解，是预测打电话的人最终是否会被指控他们所报告的罪行的关键一步。此外，了解这些过程是如何出现的，对于开发最先进的课程至关重要，以教育警察了解他们的预期的准确性和后果，并教育律师为他们认为无辜的客户辩护。鉴于虚假定罪对无辜的个人和公众对整个刑事司法系统的信任都会产生严重的后果，该项目的重点是系统地调查侦探误导的“预感”的来源，这些“直觉”传闻地导致了虚假定罪。这项研究使用了各种数据驱动的方法来识别嫌疑人和被指控犯有正在报告的罪行的预测因素。首先，我们将创建一个真实911呼叫的大型语料库，以分析报告暴力犯罪的语言和听觉行为方面，以查看外行人和执法人员的预期是否准确。我们将招募非专业人员、警察、911接线员和创伤诊所医生来听取这些电话，并报告他们对来电者的印象，以确定举报暴力犯罪的哪些方面会引起怀疑，并预测实际上将成为犯罪嫌疑人。我们将确定这些影响的心理学解释，以及可能缓和这些影响的因素，如呼叫者的种族和性别。在整个研究中，我们将使用间接的、数据驱动的方法来评估是什么让人们产生怀疑，而不会将研究人员的假设强加于设计上，例如使用自然语言处理机器学习模型。我们还将测试911电话中目击者情绪表达的下游后果，以确定他们报告的罪行在审判时被错误定罪的可能性。最后，我们将对已知无罪的案件(无罪开赦者案件档案)进行量化编码，找出是什么引发了对无辜者的怀疑，重点是提到他们的行为似乎“不寻常”。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In every false conviction case, there came a point in the investigation when an innocent person became a suspect. Despite the countless accounts of how this presumed guilt can start a chain reaction of confirmation bias that taints all stages of the criminal justice process, little is known about what triggers suspicion about the innocent person in the first place. Drawing from existing and to-be-created databases, the overarching goal of this project is to identify and understand what demographic, behavioral, and linguistic factors initially spark suspicion and trigger dangerous confirmation bias processes leading to false convictions. We focus on one of the earliest moments in which a person might become a suspect: when they call 911. A key hypothesis is that when witnesses’ behaviors violate expectations, people “morally typecast” the witness as less capable of being a victim and more capable of being a perpetrator. Increasing basic understanding on how these expectations are formed, how they are violated, and how they interact with witnesses’ gender and race, is a critical step towards predicting whether callers are ultimately charged with the crime they are reporting. Moreover, understanding how these processes emerge will be critical in developing state-of-the-art curriculum to educate police about their expectations’ accuracy and consequences, and to educate attorneys on defending clients they believe to be innocent. Given the serious consequences that false convictions have on both innocent individuals and the public trust in the criminal justice system at large, the project’s focus has broad societal impact by systematically investigating the source of detectives’ misguided “hunches” that have anecdotally led to false convictions. This study employs a variety of data-driven methods to identify predictors of suspicion and being charged with the crime one is reporting. First, we will create a large corpus of real 911 calls to analyze linguistic and acoustic behavioral aspects of reporting a violent crime to see if laypeople and law enforcements’ expectations are accurate. We will recruit lay people, police officers, 911 operators, and trauma clinicians to listen to these calls and report their impressions of the caller to identify what aspects of reporting a violent crime generates suspicion and predicts actually becoming a suspect in the crime. We will identify psychological explanations for these effects as well as factors that might moderate these effects, such the caller’s race and gender. Across studies, we will use indirect, data-driven ways of assessing what makes people suspicious without imposing the researchers’ hypotheses on the design, such as using natural language processing machine-learning models. We will also test downstream consequences of witnesses’ emotion expression in a 911 call for the likelihood of being falsely convicted at trial for the crime they reported. Finally, we will quantitatively code cases of known innocence (exoneree case files) for what sparked suspicion about the innocent person, focusing on mentions of their behavior seeming “unusual”.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.